The Republican presidential race has developed its own intraparty economic wedge issue: minimum wage increases.

Mitt Romney would prefer to peg the hourly rate to inflation, so it rises automatically when prices do.

But Newt Gingrich claims that policy — which Romney’s supported since his term as Massachusetts governor — would contribute to unemployment by constantly raising payroll costs.

“Virtually every economist in the country believes that further makes it difficult for young people to get a job,” the former House speaker said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We should be making it easier for young people to get a job, not raising the cost of hiring young people, making it harder.”

Ronald Reagan famously did not raise the minimum wage during his two terms in the White House. But 10 states already index their minimum wage to inflation, including swing states Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Ohio and Nevada. Likewise, Romney would have the wage increase from its current $7.25 an hour based on measurements like the consumer price index.

“My view has been to allow the minimum wage to rise with the CPI or with another index so it adjusts automatically over time,” Romney said last month, according to a recording made by the National Employment Law Project Action Fund.

Gingrich doesn’t offer his own plan beyond leaving in place the current system, which requires federal legislation for any increase.

“There’s sort of a crack developing in this Republican ideology that the free market will solve everything,” said Anne Thompson, a policy analyst at the liberal-leaning organization that made the video, adding that the GOP faith in the markets is increasingly “divorced from reality.”

As for Gingrich’s contention that virtually every economist agrees with him, among those who don’t is Alan Krueger.

Krueger, then a Princeton professor and now chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, co-wrote a landmark 1994 paper that found a higher minimum wage in New Jersey didn’t quash hiring at fast-food restaurants compared with those in nearby Pennsylvania.

William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, attacked the research for defying “common sense.”

“One of the most important economic principles is called the law of demand,” Dunkelberg told POLITICO. “The higher the price of something, the lower the demand. If you raise the price of unskilled labor, people will find ways to take less of it.”

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